Digital Onboarding at Remote Monitoring and Management platform
Type:
Platform for IT support partners
Collaborators:
Jonathan Maclean (UX Designer)
Akazue Moses (UX Researcher)
Meaghan Reinecke (Sr. UX Manager)
Tools:
Miro, Adobe XD
Platform:
Desktop and Mobile
Timeline:
7 months
Overview:
During Summer and Fall 2022, I got an amazing opportunity of being a UX researcher and designer at N-able Technologies. N-central is a remote monitoring and management platform - one of the main assets (also one of the most complicated product) and platform at N-able. Often it is difficult for our partners to understand the tool and use it in their daily work.
The current state of the platform had a bunch of links to make the user understand about each functionality, also the user has to do a lot of back and forth to the documentation and training videos to gain experise at the usability of the platform. This also led to heavy reliability on the support team, to help the users.
Working closely with the senior UX Designers, User Researchers and Product Managers helped me gain an insight on how we can optimize the product understanding and reduce the whole transaction time which goes behind learning about the platform.
Impact after Phase 1 launch:
Increase in Page Views:
37.5%
Increase in Trialist Conversions:
43%
Decrease in Average Duration:
67.3%
Design Process
Understanding
Define
Ideate
Prototype
Test
Gather insight about N-central in-depth (MSP institute videos)
Rapid research discussed on Miro - user objectives, journey maps, persona etc.
Label & select important workflows and draft wireframes.
Finalize the best ones and apply visual design elements.
Usability Study (Functionality testing), select new features to be introduced.
Design Process and Notes
Problem Statement
What is N-central?
N-central is used to grow and scale the business through efficient IT automation with N-able N-Central. It offers complete oversight and organization of customers' IT networks from one dashboard.
Other features to help with automation include patch management, endpoint protection software, automated reports, self-healing, and NetPath, which allows you to monitor connectivity to your users’ most critical cloud, on-premises, or hybrid applications.
My Role:
My role in this project was to go through the reference videos and documentation, identify the main workflows on the platform, label the workflows, optimize the content from the resources, design the wireframes and participate in usability testing along with UX researchers.
Background:
Early product engagement is a critical indicator of long-term customer health and a driver of business value.
The introduction of Pendo creates the opportunity for increased product engagement and improved digital onboarding for both N-central triallists and partners.
This has the potential to help trialling partners find value in N-central as soon as early as possible and ensure the educational gap, which can prevent customers from finding value in N-central, is eliminated.
Objective:
Use digital onboarding to effectively guide users towards key goals or tasks that are representative of healthy use of N-central's feature set.
The built experience is a combination of walkthroughs and pop-ups whose main goal is onboarding new users and showing them what first steps they should take when they log in, to help them get familiar with all the functionalities of the platform in minimal time.
Background and Guide Hierarchy
What type of project is this?
This is a highly impactful customer-oriented and analytics-driven project. Further changes and improvements will be made on a regular basis with release cycles. Reports will be created in the second post-release stage of the project to measure to what extent users feel confident to start using N-central without the support of an onboarding technician, and whether our own guides are being used to contribute to that purpose.
What user problem is being solved?
We are attempting to mitigate the uncertainty users may experience when they haven’t been shown the product through a demo by Sales or, even so, reinforce those fundamentals they may have learned during calls with sales engineers and other onboarding professionals. The user onboarding experience is now smoother and contains relevant updated content.
N-central before the Onboarding guide
"Felt like I was a bit lost in what I was doing and I was hoping clicking things would solve it for me"
-(Aaron - Network Engineer)
"The UI can be a pain in the ass sometimes. For example, when I want to access advanced settings, I gotta click through multiple menus instead of having them readily available. It's like they want me to waste my damn time."
-(Keith - Systems Engineer)
"I am not sure what to do next."
-Neerav (Tech support,N-able)
"It took me a whole day to understand
the platform"
- Anshika (Intern, N-able)
Hypotheses
-
We hypothesise that the availability of onboarding tours at all times*
will increase trial conversion
because trial users only have two means to onboard themselves, MSP Institute and documentation, and neither of them are available within the product. -
We hypothesise that this new real-time guidance
will increase product adoption
because
our partners will see the real value of N-central faster
-
We hypothesise that this educational set of tours
will increase retention
because
this user onboarding process will make our users feel expertise while using this RMM solution and will increase product usage
-
We hypothesise that these reusable onboarding flows
will decrease customer support cost
because
user onboarding provides a lot of useful tips to customers about how they can use our product.
The Users
User Objectives:
-
Understand partners' digital onboarding expectations and pain points with current manual onboarding practices.
-
Understand business expectations of digital onboarding and design onboarding to meet user and business needs.
-
Validate the effectiveness of onboarding triggers, copy, and videos in guiding partners towards key goals or tasks in N-central.
-
Validate the utility of onboarding videos in helping partners learn on-demand and build proficiency.
User Persona:
Empathy Map
-
As per the current user interviews and personas generated - we created an empathy map to map what our design team knows about the potential audience. This tool helped us understand the reason behind some actions a user takes deeply.
Optimize content for guide creation
We took iterative approach for this process:
-
MSP institute videos on youtube: As a first step, first I went through the training videos which partners have to go through in order to understand all the functionalities of the platform and did video transcription on Miro Board (Raw full version of data along with screenshots of the screens, which can be further optimized)
 |  |  |
|---|
-
Label the workflows and design the content for tooltips with the help of arrow and boxes which will be displayed on the screen as the part of guide. (Miro Board)
-
Optimize the content and decide the sequence of the tooltip prompts.
Guide Features Walkthrough
Welcome Modal:
Quickstart Menu:
-
This guide won’t activate unless users click on it, but a tooltip will pop up only once, after the user has exited out of the onboarding tour experience for the first time, to let users know they can reactivate the tours here.
Animations:
-
They diverse based on whether the UI element’s background is dark (outline glow) or light (intermittent brightness) to guarantee the utmost visibility.
Draggable Popups:
-
Certain steps have been made draggable either to facilitate following the instructions from an embedded learning video or to avoid covering the user interface when the tooltip is placed on top of a relevant section of the page.
A cyan icon will appear next to the title to let users know that the current step tour can be moved around and, when hovered over, a dark tooltip will be displayed explaining what the icon symbolises.
Deployment, General Overview and Configuration:
-
Experience-enhancing behaviour
When users finish their last remaining tour, instead of going back to the Deployment, General Overview or Configuration navigation menu, they are immediately redirected to the Welcome to N-central guide. -
This way, a) we give them a little “push“ when they complete a set of tours and may not know where to go next, and b) we save them an unnecessary step.
-
This step jump only occurs the first time all tours of a category are completed. After that, if a user ends any tour of that particular category, no step jump will be triggered.
Functionality Testing
Research Questions:
-
What are partners' digital onboarding expectations and pain points with current manual onboarding practices?
-
What is the influence of onboarding triggers, copy, and videos on partners' ability to achieve set goals and tasks?
-
What is the influence of digital onboarding on helping partners build proficiency in using the key functionalities of N-central?
-
What is the influence of digital onboarding on helping partners appreciate the key functionalities of N-central?
Methodology:
-
Stage 1: Interviews were conducted to understand the onboarding expectations and preferences of trialling prospects and converted partners. Interviews will also be used to identify pain points with the current manual onboarding approach. Data obtained from this stage will be used to influence the design of N-central digital onboarding (triggers, copy, and videos) with Pendo guides
-
Stage 2: The digital onboarding prototype created will be evaluated with users recruited internally from non-N-central facing roles. Users will be given tasks to complete using prototypes of the onboarding guides and asked to evaluate the triggers, videos, and copy in the prototype
-
Stage 3: Post-release, trialling prospects will be surveyed at the end of their 30-day trial period to assess the influence of digital onboarding on identified goals (conversion, reduced support calls, etc.)